Ring of Fire
by La Guera
Summary: John Winchester has been burning since they put his Mary out.


**Disclaimer: **All characters herein are the property of Eric Kripke, Robert Singer, and the CW network. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N: **Written for the John Winchester Challenge on LiveJournal.

John Winchester lies in bed and listens to his sons through the thin wall that separates their bedrooms. Or rather, he would be listening if there was anything to hear, but it's three in the morning and his boys are asleep. If he were to get up and creep to the doorway of their room right now, he knows what he would see: Dean, six years of an indistinct hump under the blankets, and Sam, two years old and huddled beside Dean like a contented puppy, diapered ass butted in a proprietary curve against his brother's leg. A chubby thumb would be lodged firmly in his mouth, and his other hand would be clutching the threadbare arm of Dean's pajamas, as though he's afraid Dean might slip away in the night if he doesn't tether him to him by flesh and blood and a baby brother's grasping hand.

Maybe he is afraid. Before, Sammy had no problem sleeping in his crib. He'd slept through the night from three months on, and on the rare occasion he did wake in the night, he usually put himself to sleep again by taste-testing his toes. Mary used to joke that if nothing else, Sammy'd make one hell of a contortionist.

But Mary, like Sammy's beatific calm, is a part of before, and thinking of her hurts deep in the bones, makes him want things and times that will never come again, and so he wills his thoughts away from her and concentrates on Sammy's disrupted sleeping pattern in the here and now. Sammy doesn't sleep on his own anymore and hasn't since they left home. He sleeps with Dean or not at all.

He knows he should break Sam of the habit for Dean's sake as much as his own. He'd even tried for a while. He'd stood in the Childcare aisle of Chapters and read parenting books by pediatricians and self-proclaimed baby whisperers, and they'd all said to separate him gradually. So he'd gotten Bobby to scrounge together an old infirmary cot and put it against the wall of Dean's room. Sammy had screamed from the minute he'd been laid in it, and no amount of shushing or floor-walking had quieted him. He'd wailed until he was hot and feverish in his arms, and in the end, it was easier to let Dean take him into bed with him, cushioned in a nest of blankets and pillows. After a repeat performance the following night, he'd given up and let nature take its course. There were some battles not worth fighting.

He worries, though; he can't help it. It's not just Sammy who's different now. Dean is, too. He's too quiet for a boy his age, too disciplined and wary of the unimagined horrors that lurk around corners and even on the flat, safe planes of walls. Oh, he still tears through the house and climbs on the cheap furniture, but he suspects it's not so much play as reconnaissance, a frantic patrolling of the steadily-shrinking perimeters of his known world. He's too quick to assume the worst of every bump and rattle in the night, and though part of him admires how quick he is to place himself between Sammy and perceived danger, it bothers him, too. It reminds him of the grunts in Vietnam who volunteered to walk point because they had been dead a long time gone.

_You're not the same, either, babe, _says Mary inside his head, and his body shudders with want. She's been a long time gone-he knows how long to the day-but it will never be long enough to let go. She's into him like muscle memory, and sometimes, he itches with the memory of her and has to soothe it away with smooth, furious jerks of his hand, breathing through his nose so Dean and Sam won't hear.

And just as she has been so many times, she's right. Well, to a point. He's not the same, but it's less of a reinvention than a reversion to an old status quo, one he had established the first time in Vietnam, when he'd held his M-16 like a cherished lover and prayed not to drown in a shitpit rice paddy latrine. Everything old is new again, and no less ugly for its familiarity. There are no malaria pills this time, and no jungle rot that eats through his toes and the soles of his feet, but there are night sweats and nightmares and the claustrophobic sensation of drowning in open air. He can't shake the feeling that the ground beneath his feet is littered with bouncing betties, and that one misstep is all it'll take to blow his stupid, bumbling ass to hell. Nor can he rid himself of the surety that he's being watched. Sometimes, he stops talking in mid-sentence or mutes the TV in the middle of a Jayhawks game because the dreadful weight of observation has settled on the nape of his neck, but when he searches for the source from the corner of his eye, all he ever sees are dust motes and shadows.

The nightmares he could handle once upon a time. Hell, he'd been having them since 1970, when he first figured out that war wasn't a childhood game of cops and robbers with fancier equipment. It was real and sorry and useless, and you couldn't put back another man's guts once you'd spilled them onto damp, jungle soil. He'd learned that first-hand in the fall of 1970, when he'd gutted a thirteen-year-old VC like a fish and then puked into the knot of entrails. For some dumbass reason, he'd dropped to his knees in the middle of the jungle, picked them up, and tried to put them back, like he'd thought he could take it back if he could just make them fit. He'd still been at it, crying and puking and wallowing in cooling intestines, when Deacon had dragged him out of the line of fire. The boy and his guts had still been there when they'd moved out, and the blood had dried on his hands until he'd washed them in a river.

He might've left the body behind, but the boy has followed him ever since, inhabiting his dreams as he had once inhabited a mud hut on the banks of a dirty stream. In the immediate aftermath of the war, he had come on the cusp of sleep, startling him to sweat-sticky wakefulness with his questioning gaze. His visits had gotten infrequent over the years, and he had attributed his departure to time and healing, the amazing capacity of the human mind to make peace with that which could destroy it, but now he wonders if it wasn't Mary who'd kept him away for all these years. He hadn't dreamed of the kid since a year after Dean was born, but now he comes every night. Just like old times.

Except he can't handle the nightmares anymore because the kid isn't alone. Mary is with him now, and they stand at the foot of his bed in mute accusation. The kid holds his clotted guts in his stiff hands in wordless offering, and pieces of Mary flake off and flutter gently to the coverlet. It reminds him of the lace handkerchief she'd thrown from the window of the Impala on their wedding day, and the association turns his guts beneath the skin.

On the really bad nights, he can see the maggots crawling in the proffered insides and smell burning hair. Mary's hair, his mind screams, and that's usually when he wrenches himself to consciousness, sitting bolt-upright in bed and breathing in thick half-sobs that cut his throat and fill it with mud and blood. On those nights, he gets out of bed and checks on his children, and then he stumbles into the bathroom and stands in the shower with his clothes on. Once upon a time, he'd slept naked and let the air dance on his skin, but now he knows that he might have to flee with his sons in the middle of the night, so he sleeps in everything except his pants and shoes.

On some nights, the blackness has no bottom and is thick and snaring as a jungle vine, and on those nights, he huddles in the darkest recess of his mind and simply endures. He watches the dream unfold with nothing to blunt the inevitable blows but his elbows, knees, and shin. The kid he adopted in the Vietnamese jungle holds out his guts, and Mary's hair burns like a candle wick. The skin around her face blackens and chars, but her eyes and lips never pop and sizzle and run like wax. Her gaze remains steady, and the expression it holds fractures something inside his chest. It's beseeching and lost and mournful, and he senses the question even though she never asks it. _Why, John?_

He doesn't know why; he wishes he did. He thinks if he knew that, he could set things to right again, reset the clock and start from zero. He suspects that it's him, a curse levied upon his head by the VC kid who never got the life he was due. He opens his mouth to tell her this and beg her forgiveness for being a lousy son of a bitch, but he never gets the chance to tell her any of it because she always turns away before he finds his courage. The kid doesn't move. He stays where he is, a spectator with eyes like river water.

Mary burns without a sound and trails fire behind her as she goes, embers to mark her way. When she reaches the far wall of the room, she neither stops nor disappears through it. Instead, she climbs the wall, knees drawing impossibly high and fingers splayed and sloughing flesh as she goes. His analytical mind records these details as the saner part of him recoils, but he cannot move, cannot even shut his eyes. Like the kid, he can only watch.

She ascends with quick, lurching movements, and yet it takes forever. She reaches the ceiling, and he knows he should not look, but the logic of dreams is predetermined, and the muscles of his neck obey the command of unseen hands. When he looks up, she is hovering there, angular and arachnid and terrible. He never wants the dream to go any further than this, but it always does, always, always, and oh, dear God, in his heart, he knows he's in the tenth circle of Hell, one undreamed of by Dante Aligheri and his madman's mind.

He knows what's coming, and knowledge isn't mercy. Every time he has the dream, he tries to alter its course by tearing his gaze from Mary, squatting in her web on the ceiling above his head, but just as the dream always progresses to its inevitable end, he can never drop his gaze. The path is fixed. His eyes widen and his teeth clench, and the muscles of his neck throb with exertion and adrenaline. _Almost over, almost over_, he thinks, and then the end begins.

Suddenly, Mary isn't crouching anymore; she's pinned to the ceiling with her blonde hair fanned above her in defiance of gravity. Her lips are moving, and even though there is no sound in this dream world from which he can't escape, he can hear her perfectly. _Why, John?_

He opens his mouth to apologize, and then Mary opens, too, spilling her guts onto his upturned face like an egg sac. It's warm and slick and alive, and blood fills his eyes and mouth. It's hideous, sulfur and putrid flesh, and in the dim part of his mind that refuses to shut down, he registers the frantic squirm of maggots on his tongue. Somehow, the kid's guts have gotten into his Mary.

Control of his neck returns to him, and he lowers his gaze, but the damage has been done. He blinks and wipes the blood from his eyes and spits pieces of his burning wife onto the bedspread. She's on his teeth and tongue and gums, and his indignant mind rages that she shouldn't taste like death and burning fat. She had always tasted of sugar and chicory, sweet and tart and so damn like the good life. For her to taste like anything else is a perversion. He gags and retches, but even so, his tongue scrapes the back of his teeth and gums and swallows her down, because even rancid and perverted, it's still a part of his Mary.

When he gets himself together again, he realizes that the kid is still at the foot of his bed. The kid smiles at him, teeth pitted and blackened and loose in his gums, and he notices that his hands are empty. Guts for guts, my man. Debt paid. He has time to catch sight of the ragged, seeping hole the blade of his military knife made in a galaxy far, far away, and then the dream finally lets him go. He jolts to awareness with a sour taste in his mouth and a sob caught in his throat like a pebble. On those nights, he gets out of bed, relieves the hot, shrunken knot of his bladder in the nearest pisser, and drinks until the taste of blood and burning fat is either burned away by the booze or blunted into insignificance by the heavy-headed bliss of piss drunk.

He tries to keep those nights to a minimum, but sometimes Dean comes into the kitchen while he's still slumped and bleary-eyed at the table, one hand lying nervelessly on the table because he's slept on it and the other curled possessively around the cool neck of a bourbon bottle. He's not sure what's worse when that happens: Dean seeing him like that, or his utter lack of surprise when he does. He just stares at him for a moment with that blank, guarded face that's too old for him, wipes the sleep from his eyes with the back of one hand, and trudges to the refrigerator see if the milk has gone sour like everything else.

Tonight's not one of those nights, though. There had been no dreams that he can remember, and his heartbeat had been slow and steady when he'd opened his eyes. He's just awake, listening to the silence from his boys' room and ignoring the damp prickle of sweat as it trickles down the narrow ridge of his spine and pools at the base. It's hell-hinge hot on the cusp of a Kansas summer, and uncharacteristically humid with the promise of a thunderstorm. Before daybreak, he bets. He supposes that the heat could be what drove him from sleep, but he doubts it. Vietnam was a weltering hothouse, and he'd slept like the dead beneath his scrap of mosquito netting.

_Oh, but Mr. John papa, everything change now, _croons a clucking, childish voice inside his head, and it takes him a minute to realize that it's the kid from his past and his unpleasant dreams. That he has taken up residence in his waking life, even in the hours that are traditionally his, unnerves him, and he wonders when the barriers between the living and the dead got so goddamn thin.

His mind and his senses cast about for the cause of his inexplicable alertness, a sound that shouldn't be there or the lack of one that should, but it's fuck o'clock, and all's well. His hackles sleep on his nape, and his mouth is devoid of the sour, ozone tang of adrenaline.

_You didn't sense nothing on that night in the nursery, either, _the kid says, though the words are oddly compressed, as though he is forcing them through his nose and not his blood-stained, rotten-toothed mouth. _You was sleeping on the couch, and you never saw problem until she scream for you. Then you was fast, but not fast enough. She leave her blood on her baby's face and burn like candle. Or maybe napalm flare. Those burn for long time. Sometimes they never stop._

That cheerful thought lodges in his gut like a cold knife, and he throws back the covers and swings his feet over the side of the bed, careful not to disturb the salt lines that encircle it. He steps over it with a ginger, balletic footstep and goes next door to check on his boys. He moves silently in his socked feet, and he is unaware that he does so in a semi-crouch.

The door to the boys' room is ajar, and he pushes it further open with the palm of one splay-fingered hand. The hinges creak, but he sees by the dim illumination of Sammy's Scooby nightlight that neither of the boys stir. They lie pretty much as he'd pictured them. The only differences are that Sammy's pacifier is on the floor beside the bed and Dean's arm dangles bonelessly off the edge, as though he were reaching for it in his sleep. They are undisturbed and blessedly alone, and he allows himself to breathe and sag heavily against the doorframe in a moment of wistful contemplation.

Dean's foot peeks from beneath the covers, and he considers going in and rearranging the blankets. It's what Mary would've done, but he decides it's best he just leave them be. He goes to the kitchen instead and gets the bottle of bourbon from the top of the refrigerator, but he doesn't take up his customary post at the table. He returns to the doorway of the boys' room and sits cross-legged on the floor. He unscrews the cap of the bourbon with a twist of his wrist, takes a deliberate, gurgling sip, and studies his children in the weak light from Scooby's eyes and wagging tail.

The memories that come now are sweeter, and he knows it's because the best of Mary is in there, divided between his sons. Dean inherited her hair and eyes, and Sammy got her patience and sunny disposition. He wonders what else each of them might've gotten if she hadn't burned to death on the ceiling of the nursery. Maybe Sammy would've been gifted her love of puzzles to go along with his patience. Maybe he would've sat in the living room with her and pieced together one of those ten-thousand piece pictures of a poppy field. Maybe Dean would've gone to her for advice on the night of his first real date, clutching flower stems in one huge fist and checking his hair in the warped reflection of the colander as it drains in the sink. As it stands, the only thing they've got left of her now are hazy memories that fade with each passing day. There aren't even any pictures. The fire took those, too.

He's luckier on that score; he had long enough with her to etch memories into the very fabric of his mind, untouchable by even smoke and flame. They are his treasure and his greatest torment, and he holds them in trembling hands and presses them to his aching heart as often as he can. It's all that keeps him sane, keeps him from taking the coward's way out and tongue-fucking gunmetal with the wet, eager blade of his tongue.

He sorts through them on the tatty, stained rug in front of his sons' room where so many strangers had left their imprint before him. He touches them with fond, reverent fingers, lets them drizzle between his fingers like Mary's hair had once done on warm spring days and cold winter nights when the only heat had come from entwined bodies and shared breath. Some he examines but briefly because they ache for their very sweetness and the reminder of the light he'd once lived in. Others he turns and devours with the fervor of a starving man.

The one he brings to his lips tonight on the cool, smooth lip of the bourbon bottle is one he would swallow whole if he could. It is of Mary at the beginning of things, of them, John and Mary and the family they would one day make together. Mary is heavy with the bump that would soon be Dean, and she sits propped in the bed with her pretty hands threaded over her enormous stomach. She's laughing, laughing because he, John Winchester, a man who professed no love for soppy romanticism, has made her breakfast in bed. She looks at the waffles and runny eggs and the sliced melon and laughs, and her dimples are clear in the milky December sunshine.

"John Winchester, you treat me like a queen," she says.

"Always, Mare. Always."

He remembers now that she had scarfed everything he put in front of her, and then she'd asked him to cook her a rasher of bacon. She'd eaten the whole damn lot slathered in sweet cream butter and maple syrup, polished it off with uncharacteristically indelicate gusto, and he'd cracked jokes about her harboring an alien creature bent on world domination.

"At least you take responsibility for what's yours," she says in his mind, and rubs her distended belly, and the man that he was laughs and sips his coffee.

These are memories his boys will never share. That one, and Mary on the day Dean was born, brought into the world on the howling wind of a January snowstorm. He'd been stubborn, and the doctor had suctioned him out with a high-tech toilet plunger. Dean had looked like a conehead for three damn days, but Mary had crooned and called him her boy and loved him without end.

They should, he knows, but he also knows that he can never bring himself to part with them. He's afraid that to spread them is to dilute them, afraid that if he lets them go, even to someone as precious as his boys, they will begin to fade, to blur around the edges. He's afraid that one day, the only place he'll be able to remember Mary's face is in his nightmares, when she comes to him with the kid as her escort, burning like candle flame while the kid holds his rotten guts in offering.

Of all the things his boys will hate him for before the end of their raising, that's the truest and fairest reason of all. Hell, he hates himself for it, and he suspects that he'll be riding horses in Hell for it. These pieces of their mother are the only legacy he can give them-everything else is dust and ash. And yet they sit locked inside his mind, doomed to die with him because he can't let them go.

_Of course you can't, _rumbles Bobby Singer's voice. _They're what reminds you that you weren't always in Hell, that across that distant shore was a better place. Because you _are _in Hell now, John Winchester, make no mistake. You've been there since Mary left the world in a burning ring of fire, spiraling deeper every day, and fuck knows when you'll hit bottom. You ever wonder which ring you're on? Dante said there were nine, each with their own class of sinner. Maybe you're on three, the circle of gluttons. God knows your lust for revenge has consumed everything else. Or maybe five, where people who died angry rage against the dying of the light in eternal darkness. Anger is what drives you now, anger more than love, because if you had a lick of sense, you'd stop chasing the smell of sulfur and burning flesh across the country and give these boys a shred of sanity and childhood._

He decides then that if anyone ever asks him why he sometimes sits cross-legged in front of his boys' room like an Indian wallah on the eve of a battle from which he won't return, he'll tell them the truth. He'll tell them that he watches them sleep because it's the only time they look like the children they are and should be. Dean's face is too old when he's awake, and Sammy's eyes are too wide when they're open, as though he's trying to see it all before he goes blind or is seeing too damn much. Maybe both. In the dark, he can't see the scars this nomadic life has given them, and he takes small comfort in the illusion.

Bobby Singer is wrong, he thinks as he raises the bottle to his lips. He's not on the third ring of Hell, or the fifth, or even the ninth, with his ass sticking out of the Devil's mouth. No, he's passed through them all and returned to the mountain of purgatory, perched on the summit just beyond the reach of heaven and reminded of his loss by the thin, golden band on the third finger of his left hand. He weeps for what he has lost, though he knows it will do no good.

He looks at his wedding band. Even in the faint light cast by Scooby, the ring glows with its own brightness, and he's struck by lyrics from an old Johnny Cash tune.

"I fell into a burnin' ring of fire," he sings, and the words catch in the rounded, puckered mouth of the bottle and adopt an eerie echo, prophecy from the lips of a corpse. The boys stir uneasily in their bed, but he doesn't stop. He can't. "It burns, burns, burns, and the flames grow higher."

John Winchester takes a swallow from the bottle at his lips and burns from the inside out.


End file.
